Huzzah!

In the bookshop I found the new Temeraire book, Victory of Eagles, and I've been spending much of the past two days reading it. It's a good 'un, and includes the entrance of one Arthur Wellesley, known in the book as General Wellesley, and in the real world becomes the 1st Duke of Wellington, and he goes around being pragmatic, efficient, and extremely ruthless. It's a nice change, as in previous books the heroes have been stuck working for bumbling, close-minded and annoying people and get stuck trying to decide where their real duty lies - following incompetent and self-serving orders, or being recalcitrant and achieving something. Wellesley is also causing people to question where their duty lies, but at least by following his orders people know that they'll be looking after Britain. For the greater good?

With all historical novels, there's always a certain tension between one's knowledge of real world events and the alternate version presented by the author - in this case, by the inclusion of dragons as air force and the change in tactics and historical events that would mean. At this point, Novik has completely gone off the map, there is no history book that will tell you what's more or less supposed to happen, as there was in Black Powder War; from now on we get to find out how the Napoleonic Wars are going to turn out when she's ready to tell us and not before. It's very exciting.

My main negative point is this: the proof reading in the edition I read is just plain careless. The spelling is correct - automated spell checkers can give us that at least, but there are many places throughout where words are missing, or shouldn't be there, or the pronouns are messed up. It's annoying having to break out of immersion in order to work out what the writer meant, and I would have expected a professional publisher to do better.

Review: The Company

Easter has just been and, in the dollop of free time preserved by my assiduous refusal to go to things, I did a certain amount of movie watching. My local video shop is the estimable Aro Video Shop, and so there was a wide selection of 'thinky' movies available, and I ended up with the serious art world's answer to Center Stage: The Company.

Happy escapism, this is not. It's about the Joffrey Ballet Company of Chicago, except it isn't set inside the company, it's starring the company. It shows glimpses of the working and personal lives of the company members over a period of time, roughly the amount of time it takes to produce a new ballet from the first meeting with the choreographer to the first night, with frequent interspersements of the performances that the company is working on in the meantime. It's not at all linear - the fragile threads of story that you end up seeing are built out of a mosaic of small private moments, often of people you don't know the name of, and will never know the endings of. The mosaic style of movie (or book), I confess I find quite tiring to watch, all the information comes out of small details and you need to pay constant attention to keep track of what's happening. It was also filmed in an uncomfortable manner. There were lots of long and medium shots with very few closeups, often dark lighting, or shots looking straight at the stage lights, the view was frequently obscured by other people and various furniture, and I realised after a while that we never got to see anyone's eyes or feel that the people filmed were looking at us, which added to the uncomfortableness of it. As with other works that are built as a mosaic, somewhere between a third and two thirds of the movie I found I was wondering why I was still watching.

In this movie, the answer is the dancing. It's absolutely gorgeous. There are no body doubles or camera tricks to make people look better than they are, this is pure unadulterated magical movement, and the nett result of the camera and lighting weirdness is the closest experience to actually being at a live performance that I've seen. The company has a wide repertoire, from the opening (to an electronic soundtrack) of dancers in a weirdly abstract sequence with the rustle of long ribbons and the pat of the dancers' feet as the main sounds heard, to the excursions into classical ballet, exquisite solo pieces, and the final production number of the Giant's Mouth, it's all wonderful. Often the dancing pieces appear without comment or explanation, simply as the performance that the company is working on just then, often we are shown the progression from rehearsal into final performance.

Just lovely.

Review: in a fishbone church

A while ago, I complained bitterly about how bleak New Zealand books were. Someone (Morgan) suggested that I try Catherine Chidgey as being somewhat less dour, so when I saw a book by her in the Uni bookshop I decided to give her a try out.

Well, to be honest, the book is still pretty dark. It's written in a style (that seems to be popular with the literati set) of structuring the narrative as a mosaic - there are continual filmic cuts between characters and timeframes without many cues to the reader to help them adjust to the changes. I posit that cinema cuts are easier to cope with in cinema because the visuals can get more information through quickly than the linear word-by-word info stream of a novel. On the other hand, my experience of in a fishbone church (and Baby No-Eyes, Patricia Grace and Below, Tim Corballis) is that of a very complete all-encompassing experience, so maybe one of the points of this style of writing is to approach the wider info-stream available to films. I still find the style very tiring to read, though. In all three of the books I've mentioned there's no real centre of mass to get to grips with, nor is there an ending that provides much closure, they just go on and on and then stop (1). I also find that I need to pay a lot of attention - small details that appear in passing in the beginning of the books are referred to with much more context near the end.

Of the three, they're all uncomfortable in terms of content. Baby No-Eyes is right up there as a counter-discursive, 'writing back' kind of book; Below seems to exist primarily in order to torture the reader; and in a fishbone church is more subtle, but still disquieting, I think because of the continued threat implied into domestic situations: hair combs that scrape bone, eating swans full of shotgun pellets, being nearly drowned in a bath, and so forth. I'm going to change my opinion that this darkness is somehow endemic to NZ writers, however, I think that it's more part of the desire to be perceived as a 'serious' and 'literary' writer. As an inveterate reader of science fiction and fantasy, I find I still like having a nice solid story to get into, rather than having to understand the psychology of the characters from every conceivable angle. Also, because these novels are all set in situations that are potentially real, there are few sources of external conflict so the authors need to provide internal psychological tension in order to have something worth writing about (2).

My overall verdict? Interesting, but I think I'm going to slope off back to genre fiction for a while.

(1) To adapt a quote from the movie Amadeus: "You don't even finish your songs with a bang so that the audience knows when to clap."
(2) The exception being Baby No-Eyes which includes a major land demonstration.

The Apostle

This afternoon when I ought to have been studying, I watched a Robert Duvall movie called The Apostle, which is about an evangelical preacher in the American Deep South. It's a very good movie, but the thing I found most fascinating was the language.
They had a whole bunch of Holiness Temple preachers in full bore (real ones, that is), and it sounded like a tidal wave, they had all these lovely long dipthongised vowels, and were emphasising stressed words a lot, and used extra unstressed words to manipulate where the key words would be to get the best verbal emphasis. There were also a lot of terminal -e sounds being tacked on to words, as if they needed an extra syllable to get their mouths around the next cascade of words: self-e, don-e, Jesus-uh. The whole thing made me wonder if the preachers were anything like an Old English bard in full flight. Absolutely fascinating.

Review: KapCon

I've never really been to a roleplaying convention before. I missed the various incarnations of the Flying Crocodile Cup, never got around to Battlecry and in general haven't been doing that much tabletop roleplaying lately. I turned up to one of the games in Confusion last year, but I was only there for an afternoon so decline to count it. On the other hand, it turns out that very many of my friends in Wellington, as well as a flatmate (Norman) and visiting guest (Struan) have been considering KapCon as one of the highlights of their social year, so I thought I'd give it a try.

First off, I had a lot of fun. I met many interesting new people, and got to know some other interesting people that I'd previously only had a nodding aquaintance with. The games were also tres cool, even though I didn't play in every session. (I have a tendency to get peopled out, especially in crowds, and the walls of Wellington High School are quite good at reflecting sound. The term "Tidal Wave of Noise" was very applicable at times.)

Of the games I played in, two were fairly standard short games - enjoyable, but they didn't push me out of my comfort zone. The others were somewhat ... interesting. One was a medical soap opera in which we were filming the pilot of Wellington's answer to Shortland St "Bleeding Hearts", which meant acting out scenes - turning into sides of bacon, hurriedly rearranging furniture as needed, upstaging each other like mad, and doing whatever we could to improve our ratings. The plot to kidnap one of the doctors to Molvania that was foiled by a helicopter accidentally taking out the nurse Tiffany (whose real name was Greta something, and was also a mail order bride to my father the hospital accountant) was very memorable.

The other was also a semi-Larp, but much more serious. It was called "Couples", run by a chap called Tony S?, and if I had to name the genre I'd call it psychological realism. We were playing 6 friends (all paired off, but with history) who had gotten together for a weekend away by the lake in Wanaka. The twist was that we all had issues that were giving us serious grief, and the tensions of the holiday brought them all out. It was, without question, the most intense roleplaying I've ever experienced. The character sheets were detailed psych profiles that were based on real people, and after we'd had time to read through them we talked with the GM privately to work out extra details and quirks, and then spent time with our character's partners developing shared history: everything from favourite colours, the cars that we drove, an ordinary evening's entertainment down to things about our sex lives and how we felt about each other. The issues that we had to work out were all things that could happen in our real lives and some of them happened to cut very close to the bone. (I highly recommend this game, but it ain't for the faint hearted.) From a technical perspective, the roleplaying between people became very natural and unforced - the shared reality everyone was creating between them had nothing to do with what the world is like and everything to do with how we related to each other, so everything just flowed smoothly. It was incredibly intense from an emotional perspective, and I spent 20 minutes after the game was over wondering if I was going to burst into tears before turning into Princess Yun Sing for the main Larp of the evening, who is a very different person indeed. I also found that the next day I was still getting odd moments of emotional backlash that ranged from wondering what my character would be doing in 6 months time, to how I, a very different person, would have reacted to the same events. (It's rather astonishing, when you think about it, how much immersing into a character can protect your real psyche from weird shit.) I'm very glad that I got a private debriefing with Tony the next day, and I'm also very glad that I got to play in the game.

The main Larp "Rule Brittania" was great. I played a Chinese princess with a thirst for travel, some special magic medicine and a dark secret about how the medicine was made. I achieved all of my goals as well as an extra that turned up during the game. (Andy, if you ever read this, waving The Book at you after the game was over and seeing you mouthing swear words at me truly made my night.) There was too much stuff going on to describe with any justice, but I take my hairpins off to the wonderfully sinister Fu Manchu, a seedy-looking businessman, who happened to be a really nice guy. (Alas, my character kept on wondering what the hell she was going to have to pay him back with later, but she really appreciated all the help he gave her.) I do have one regret though - I was playing a character who looked vulnerable and innocent but was actually dripping with Kick Arse fighting ability and magic charms that protected her from dark magic. Did anyone attack me, at all? Nope.

Logistically speaking, the con was organised with ruthless and impressive efficiency, capable of handling even my feckless and tardy self with grace and aplomb. There were no problems. At all. Everything was announced clearly, it was easy to find the game rooms (although Struan and I got lost finding the main entrance on our first day), there were snacks available at a reasonable price, there were food runs for cheap pizza and, I kid you not, everything started and finished bang on time. I didn't think it could be done, but now I have learnt my error and will henceforth strive harder to please the Gods of Punctuality in my own paltry organising efforts.

How did it compare to Science Fiction conventions, with which I have considerably more experience? Well, it's not in a hotel, so room parties, hanging out in the bar, and lounging around the piano singing filks badly just didn't happen. It was a lot less casual, unlike SF Cons where you can wander in and out of panels as you please, here you needed to sign up for 3 hour games in advance and if you were late, they might be able to slot you in, or then again they might now. There was still the atmosphere of hanging out in the foyer chatting and playing games, though, which is one of the better parts of cons everywhere.

KapCon. Do I recommend it? Absolutely.

Mmmm...

For those with a vested interest, and the occasional bloke with an interest in what men ought not wot of, there was a discussion on LiveJournal a little while ago about what kinds of things about the male gender catch one's eye. Heath Ledger was mentioned as a positive example. Tanja and I have just spent the afternoon watching Heath Ledger movies. Damn, but that boy has a nice voice. And smile. And really nice eyes. And...

(Cat, you were right. 10 Things I Hate About You is a very funny movie. :->)

I've Been Watching The Man From Uncle

It's very silly. In the last episode, "The Karate Killers", they had to chase around the world finding the flighty step-daughters of a dead scientist so that they could collect bogus scientific formulae inscribed on his photograph, rearrange the letters to "Japanese Lullabye" so that the scientist's real daughter could remember an old friend of her father's who lived in Japan, go to Tokyo, rescue the daughter from a Geisha House, find the old friend, be captured (again) and taken to the North Pole where there was a factory that was extracting gold from sea water. Then they escaped and saved the day.

It had go-go dancers, an impoverished Count, a ski-lift, a dastardly villain and the aforementioned geisha girls.

All in all, quite fun.

Review: Anansi Boys

First off, this book is dedicated to me. Me, me, me. Gosh, how did Mr Gaiman know I’d always secretly wanted to be the subject of a book dedication? It made my whole day! Anyway, on to the review.

A friend once suggested to me that Aristophanes was a funnier writer than Shakespeare because, in addition to Sex Jokes and Gender-Changing Jokes, Aristophanes had also mastered the Fart Joke. So has Neil Gaiman. I’m not kidding here – early in the piece is a very long and elaborately told joke that refers to an old woman ‘flatulating’ as just one more of its precisely crude details. In fact, the whole book is littered with the commonplaces and little embarrassments of life: hair mayonnaise and turning up late to your father’s funeral and the shriek of a cat being shampooed. Why do I think this is worth mentioning? Because this is a story about gods and the myths that they wear, and amongst the minutiae of real life is the bitter taste of funeral wine, flavoured with aloes and rosemary, and the tears of broken-hearted virgins. The commonplaces give us, the humble readers, something to identify with, a way into the story, and a place to rest from the larger events of the story quietly gleaming behind them.

Anansi Boys is a lighter book than American Gods, the sort-of prequel. This doesn’t make it light-weight, but it floats more softly over the dark undercurrents of Gaiman’s mythology. American Gods dug right in to issues of transplantation and how to live in an alien country, an epic battle between entire pantheons of gods and the death and resurrection of the son of a god, always a powerful story, whichever god it might happen to be. Anansi Boys, suitable to the tale of a trickster god, is more about a private spat, and the horribly excruciating embarrassment that one’s parents can be. Gaiman still brings out the sense of separation from one’s point of origin, particularly for Fat Charlie, born in Florida to transplanted parents who was himself transplanted to London and who remade himself so successfully that his entire accent changed. However, while many characters are either living in different places than where they were born, or are the children of such parents, it is a more subtle feature than the set-piece descriptions of the arrival and failure of different colonisation expeditions that were a repeating motif in American Gods. (One of the thumbs up aspects of Anansi Boys is not just that Gaiman never assumes that characters will by default be Caucasian, but that he delays mentioning what ethnic background his characters have until we’ve already been introduced to them and gotten to know them a little (or a lot) first. For Gaiman, race is part of his characters’ identity, but it is not the thing that defines them. He gets another thumbs up for writing different dialects convincingly without resorting to phonetic spelling, which to me is more annoyance than it’s worth.)

It is also a story of integration. Fat Charlie at the beginning of the book is, in many ways, not whole. He clings to a bad job and a not-right relationship because they give him a sense of identity that he can’t provide for himself. His brother Spider, who at first sight seems to have it all, is also lacking a sense of completeness. The meeting of their antithetical personalities brings, as one would expect, an enormous clash – matter meets anti-matter kind of thing - that threatens to destroy Fat Charlie’s life and, more subtly, Spider’s as well. Over the course of the book, Spider’s personality seems more and more fragile, and I was never quite sure how much of the fragility came from crashing against the rock that was Charlie and how much was always there, hiding beneath his flamboyant outer persona. How the two brothers will resolve this conflict is the central theme of the book. Other writers have addressed this kind of Jungian division; for instance, Ursula LeGuin, who resolved it with the wizard Ged absorbing his own shadow personality in A Wizard of Earthsea by naming it as himself. Here, names are also an issue – Fat Charlie was named so by his father Anansi and spent his life trying to escape it. His means of growing out of his nickname, as his means of growing into his identity and coping both with his father’s death and the existence of his strange and fickle brother is wholly right.

This is a finely crafted story. Many of the minor details come around again later in the book in ways that are meaningful to the whole and not jarring to the reader. The story thrives on co-incidences and the surreal Just Because-ness of a fairy tale. Gaiman juggles the multiple threads of the tale so that they spiral together into the delicate pattern of a spider’s web. Without going into too much detail for those that haven’t read it yet, the end of the story shows the web completed. Gaiman comments in an interview at the end of the book that “in horror fiction people get what they deserve, whereas in comedies people get what they need.” In this story, both definitions apply, everybody ends up precisely where they ought to be.

Weird Things

I was part of the 100+ group booking to see Serenity in Wellington last night. (Reports on the size of the booking have varied between 130 and 170 so I'm not sure how many were actually in it) and it amused me to see how many people from overlapping fields of interest came. There were Medieval Guilders and Science Fictioners and Board Gamers and Roleplayers and SCAers and many friendly Americans whom I suspected (and later found out for sure) were employed by Weta. Also the manager of the local laser strike, Sara from my Latin class, an ex-Hoarde member and an assorted miscellany of other people that I couldn't categorise so exactly. The weird thing? How many of these people all knew each other, or had friends in common, or knew each other by LiveJournal handles as Friends of Friends and wanted to know what each other looked like. (Mashugenah, did ThreeMonkeys ever catch up with you?) No seriously, about half the conversations I was in that evening included the question of what someone's LiveJournal handle was. It was good to get out for the costume party in Coyote Ugly before hand as well, worth even having to drag my costume around with me all day because I didn't have time to go home and get changed. Companion was a very popular choice, bringing with it, as it does, the opportunity to dress up to the nines. There were also some Kaylee's, Browncoats, generic Chinese/Euro mismash and a Woman with Blue Hands. She even had the gadget that makes peoples eyes bleed.

The movie itself was excellent. I'm not going to discuss it except in general terms - good plot, characters that I cared about, scary bits, sad bits, funny bits, exciing bits. Joss Whedon pulls no punches with this movie. It's also a technically accomplished movie, although as the story pulls people in very strongly it was very rare for me to pull out of suspension of disbelief to think about how cool the effects were. What did shake me out was not controllable by the movie makers. (Well, I suppose it was controllable, on a technicality.) I recognised one of the actresses in a very emotionally traumatic scene and, as I was used to seeing her in a romantic comedy, the dissonance was very very weird. River was absolutely gorgeous, especially in the way she moved. I sometimes wonder if the actress was found first and the part written for her, she fits it so well.

My one not-very-spoiler: Hang on to the end of the credits, there's a very nice guitar solo of the original theme tune.

And yet another weird thing: as I was leaving Varsity I was accosted (in the nicest possible way) by a large, friendly, red-headed giant who used to know Catherine in Palmerston North. He remembered her kindly and, as I was feeling a bit low at the time, getting to bask in a wave of reflected good feeling made me feel much better about the world.

Stephanie